Iraq: The Fatal Mistake Bush and Blair Will Never Admit

[NNN0LHI]

http://www.arabnews.com/?page=7§ion=0&article=82956&d=30&m=5&y=2006

<snip>The original decision to invade Iraq was the fatal mistake; the rest is just consequences. Iraq’s government was crueller and less loved than most regimes in the Arab world, but the United States and Britain would be facing the same kind of resistance movement today if they had invaded Morocco, Egypt or Yemen in 2003. There is no country of over two million people in the Arab world where an invading American Army would not soon be confronted by the kind of resistance it is facing in Iraq.

History matters, and for Arabs all the history is bad. Britain lured the Arabs into revolt against their Turkish overlords in World War I with a promise of independence, then carved them up into the familiar Middle Eastern states of the present and bound them all in colonial servitude. It also promised Jews a national homeland in Palestine, the State of Israel — which America has unstintingly supported, regardless of Israel’s policies toward its Arab neighbors, for over forty years. Why would any Arab country welcome an invasion by the United States and Britain?

This is a concept — that we are unloved in the Arab world because of our past behavior — that is very hard to get across to the public in Yorkshire and Texas. But then, it’s a notion that is also very hard to get across to the governments in Washington and London. They seem to feel that good intentions (as defined by themselves) should be enough to bridge the gap. If some other country had invaded Iraq with the best of intentions — Russia, say, or Japan — it might have got away with it. But the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq was doomed from the first, and Bush and Blair had dozens of experts on call who could have told them why. Either they didn’t listen, or they chose not to ask.

[Olney Blue]

1. I'm not a scholar of that region, but even I figured that out before the

war....
:banghead:

[ladjf]

2. So did millions of other people with at least a half of a brain.

[Proud Liberal Dem]

3. Common sense & logic would've helped

I truly believed, at least initially, that cooler heads (i.e. Powell) would eventually be successful in convincing Bush et. al that invading/occupying Iraq would NOT be a good idea and several people in his administration at the time had previously made public comments agreeing that containment of Iraq had been successful and that Saddam posed NO threat (immediate or otherwise) to his neighbors let alone the US and its allies. Unfortunately, all of us who held out hope that Bush would do what any "sane" President before him would've done, hopelessly and powerlessly watched him do something that will haunt our country for a long time to come. Even though I wasn't an "expert" on Iraq nor did I have any access to classifed intelligence, I had a hard time understanding exactly how Iraq almost instantaneously morphed from being a third world dictatorship with a broken military and no ability to even control its own airspace into a biological, chemical, and nuclear superpower with operational links to our #1 enemy (at the time), Al-Queda, and the means and willingness to attack the US and its allies(i.e. Israel) at any moment. I thought that Bush must be hopelessly naive or else he has access to some super top secret intelligence that he couldn't share publicly for national security reasons to try to make us believe that disarming Iraq was an even higher priority than continuing to track down Osama Bin Laden and the rest of his network of "evildoers." I was dumbstruck how even Iraq's willingness to submit to intrusive UN inspections and the subsequent lack of evidence of WMD produced by the inspections didn't seem to moderate Bush's urgent warnings. I knew by then that Bush was determined to go to war but I remained convinced, in spite of the absence of evidence or intelligence, that invading Iraq would be a bad idea and that we would NOT find any WMD if and when we did invade. If we here at DU could sit down and simply utilize a little "common sense" and "logic" to figure out that invading Iraq would be a bad mistake and would not result in us finding what Bush et. al "said" we were supposedly looking for, then what's Bush's excuse for making a bad decision when he has access to way more information than any of us WILL EVER HAVE IN OUR LIFETIME? He (and other GOP apologists) blame the intelligence community but, as we all know, the findings issued by the intelligence community didn't reflect any kind of consensus and concerns about Iraq seemed to be fueled more about the lack of overall intelligence on Iraq, as well as a 4-year gap in UN inspections than any genuine concern that Iraq had massive stockpiles of WMD just waiting to be used against us.

[Olney Blue]

4. Great post.

Welcome to DU, butlerd. It's good to have you here.